Cookbook historian Jan Longone to speak at Kendall College Saturday

April 16, 2013|By Michell Eloy | Tribune Reporter

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To the casual culinary observer, a cookbook might be tossed off as a mere collection of recipes.

Jan Longone is not your casual observer.

To the curator of American Culinary History at the University of Michigan, the cookbook, and specifically charity cookbooks (those written by church groups, schools and organizations for the purpose of raising money), were a means through which minorities and women promoted and financed the push for education, suffrage, temperance and equal rights — and as such offer indispensable insight into these historic movements.

Longone will give a talk about the history and significance of the charity cookbook at 10 a.m. Saturday at Kendall College School of Culinary Arts (900 N. North Branch St.). Tickets for the event are $5, $3 for students, and can be purchased by emailing culinary.historians@gmail.com.

The following is an edited transcript of my conversation with Longone.

Q. On their face, cookbooks are seemingly just a collection of recipes, but to you they're really a window into history and politics. Can you explain that?

A. Every cookbook tells you about the history of America in a time and place. It tells you about the dining habits of families at the time, advertising, printing. We all eat, right? It's a new way of looking at history.

Q. One of the big movements that you say was furthered by the cookbook is the women's movement through these so-called charity cookbooks. What role did these cookbooks serve?

A. The women were empowered by writing these cookbooks. It was the first time they had to go out and write, find a publisher, get advertisements. ... What men didn't realize was that these books were helping women organize and become professionals. All of the money from these early charities went to help other people — other women and children — get an education, help women learn about their rights in a job, sell their own things in exchanges. It got a group of ladies to learn how to network and empower themselves.

Q. How were the proceeds from these books used?

A. The cookbooks were really helping to empower women themselves. The Industrial Revolution was coming along at this point. People were coming from the farms of New England and moving into factories. They knew nothing about their rights or living in the city, so some of these women's organizations would give classes on how to live in the city, how to get the right to work and their responsibilities at work. It went toward funding hospitals, museums, libraries, school bands, programs helping people overcome alcoholism and drug addiction. These organizations took every single possible place to spend money and donated.

For example, there was an organization, the Jewish Settlement House in Milwaukee. The women wanted to publish a cookbook. The board, which was all male, said if you want to get the money to write a cookbook, raise it yourself. In 1901, this book, “The Settlement Cook Book,” was published, and it sold millions of copies. It was still selling up until a few years ago, and the proceeds were still going to nearly every charity in Milwaukee.

Q. What was it about the cookbook that proved such a unifying force for women?

A. The women could get away with meeting and doing all of the work to put the cookbooks out. And it was about something that they felt was their domain.

Q. A lot of people don't really think of cookbooks as champions of progressive movements. In the case of the women's movement, was that the intention, to hide these more progressive ideas in something as seemingly innocent as a cookbook?

A. Yes, I think so. There were wealthy, more educated women who could do a lot more than middle- or lower-class women. For the bulk of women at the time, it would have been astonishing for them to believe they could go out and raise money, hire a printer and an artist and sell a book. ... For them, it was a way to reach people.